October 15, 2012

Whereas most days at Pygmalion Music Festival you’ll find yourself bouncing around from place to place to catch all the good bands, for the grand finale everyone was centralized in one place, downtown Champaign at the Highdive Outdoor stage. It was an amazing set-up and led to perhaps my favorite day of live music in Pygmalion’s […]

September 26, 2012

Well, I’m off again this weekend to Champaign/Urbana, IL for the 8th annual Pygmalion Music Festival and this year promises to be the best yet, with performances from Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Dinosaur Jr., HUM, Best Coast and many more. One of my most anticipated acts is Unknown Mortal Orchestra who played a incendiary set at the […]

December 21, 2011

We’re still working on the Best Albums of 2011 list, but in the meantime here’s my annual recap of my favorite live shows + concert photos of the year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to catch as many shows in 2011 (getting old I guess?), but I still managed to see quite a bunch of bands […]

September 29, 2011

New Zealand via Portland band Unknown Mortal Orchestra (or simply UMO) released one of the best debut albums of the year a few months back and I was interested to hear how their warbly psych-pop translated live. These Kiwis stomped all over my expectations delivering a full-out jam session that downplayed the lo-fi, scratchy vibe […]

June 20, 2011

As they say, better late than clever. Or was it never? No, I don’t think that has ever been the case. You can blame Summer for its leisure arrival to great Northwest or the fact that a greater understanding of time management quite frankly just eludes me–this really only happens as it gets warmer, I […]

May 12, 2011

The Pygmalion Festival initial line-up was released a couple weeks back and like always, it’s very good. The fest has a great track record of getting bands to play right before they burst out on the indie scene (Cults last year, Yeasayer in 2007) and Unknown Mortal Orchestra looks like it may be that band […]